Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism by Mark Levin
Just read it five times.
countryboy:
An interesting choice here. If I understand Mr. Levin's thesis, he strongly urges that Americans return to the values of 17th and 18th century classical liberalism as espoused by the founding fathers of the USA and their forefathers in the century before independence. He argues that a retrograde shift to a national ethos based on the "natural laws" expressed by some 17th Century philosophers, which advocated for the primacy of limited government, individual liberties, "negative freedoms" (his term and not mine) and thus the dismantling of the statist project of modern day Liberals/progressives, is what America needs to survive and to prosper today.
Levin attempts to demonstrate that since the turn of the last century (1900 or so) that a progressive project promoting collectivism and statism by folks like Theodore Rossevelt, John Dewey, FDR, .... Bernie Sanders, is undermining the essence of what Americanism truely is. He indicates that the federal state and statists have suppressed the "hunters" (as per John Locke) by allying with and promoting their meek and cooperative followers ("sheeple" in modern day parlance) who have been caged into the modern welfare state as contented but marginalized subjects. He advocates liberating the hunters so that they can fully express their liberty by dominating the neo-liberal America with their newfound-old liberty by economic, social and local political means in the absence of a large and powerful central government. A new Jerusalem will come about if the old-now-new Americanism is unshackled from the statist yoke and allowed to flourish by leaving folks alone to do their thing as liberated hunters in the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream.
Did I get his thesis right?
If so, my response to Mr. Levin would be, "distance" makes your project unworkable. The philosophies Mr. Levin cites were all born in a pre-industrial age when agriculture was the dominant human activity and the majority of the much smaller pastoral population was spread out in rural areas. The distance between "men" and their low population density made the full and unfettered expression of individualism and natural law possible. If one of Locke's "hunters" butted up against another, then a contest of wills or pistols would result and the loser, if they survived, would likely move further afield as the frontier was unlimited and ever expanding, in order to start afresh.
Today with the frontier gone and the hunters and sheeple so concentrated in large and densely packed cities the natural expression of these principles leads to mafia-style combinations and gang-bangers kliiling each other while the successful hunters of the corporate and commercial world look on with benign indifference as the New York/New Jersey harbour front becomes a gangland domain and South Chicago or LA run red with the hunters' butcher's bill. The absence of distance causing very high population density would turn the pastoral frontier of the 18th Century US into a cauldron of social and economic competition in the 21st Century that would be every bit as dystopian as Levin's much vaunted Ameritopia of today which is presently presided over by the statists. The turmoil, structural exploitation, suffering and social anger in post-civil war America as the Guilded Age took root is an historical precedent that Levin's ideas would fall far short in liberating the American people. People/sheeple would still be enslaved and denied liberty by the hunters who would be their de facto rulers rather than the statists. This would be tyranny based on the Rule of Man rather than tyranny based on the Rule of Law. Tyranny nonetheless in either case.
Mr. Levin has written several books. Is Rediscovering Americanism the best of his? I might invest in one of his books but until I have my conversion on the road to Philadelphia, I'll only buy one if I can't find it for free in the library.
Cheers and thank you for the recommendation.
Evilroddy.
